Munro’s Stories – a Zipped File Concealed Lives –
Unzipping Files to Reveal Fragile Daily Triviality and a Tempest of Cruelty and Coldness

Dear Life is an adaptation of a short story by Nobel laureate Alice Munro, whose stories usually explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style, revealing melodramatic plots and relations or strong desires with the description of subtle movements and ambiguous dialogues in our daily life. The lightness in her language seems to stem from the inability to bear or squarely look into or desire for the heaviness in our lives.

Taiwanese novelist Egoyan Zheng has once described that “Munro’s writing style fathoms the shape of fate.”

This production extracts plots, structures and styles from various stories of Munro’s and then adapt and rewrite them in accordance with different performers and theatric styles so as to put the stories into the comprehensible context of life in Taiwan. Five episodes are separate from yet echo with each other. With the same seemingly plain tone and language with Munro, the production lays out the foundation of life that is beyond description, ambiguous, entangled and heavy. Audiences will see all the characters devoted to the rehearsals between void and performance – alienated, realistic, yet unreal – just like the performance of real life.